As Good as Hemingway

a poem

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

As Good as Hemingway

a poem

Somehow I always end up in tiny towns
with old brick walls, one or two grocery stores,
a handful of coffee shops and a few hippy
boutiques. I guess some of us were meant to
remain small, remote, never to be swallowed up
by a big city or flourish beyond the reflection
of a few stoplights. Maybe it’s God’s blessing,
after all, to shop at Walmart, and refrain from
climbing a platform I would only fall off of,
breaking my neck.

Here, we take the kids trick-or-treating down
Main Street every Halloween, puffy coats covering
the majority of their costumes, cold fingers trying to
unwrap candy, teeth chattering, running into people
from church, our H&R Block tax lady, and the barista
who knows that my husband likes his espresso strong
with just a bit of honey and cream. People can know
you here, but also, you can go years without
anyone asking your name.

The only ones who read my poetry, I imagine, are a
few curious people from Lake County, who grew up
in the same town and wonder what that skinny, blond
pastor’s kid is up to (for starters, no longer skinny or blond)
or who stumbled across a title of mine in a used book store
in Omaha, Nebraska or Tulsa, Oklahoma. And how do
books end up there? They are donated. Not treasured,
by anyone alive anyway. It is a tough place to be discovered.
But, we take what we can get.

God knows I want to write for a living, but He must
also know that I need to live in order to write. And so,
you will find me in the margins - a poem here, an essay
there, a book every few years - maybe. My husband and I
watched a documentary on Ernest Hemingway and decided
that we never want to be that good (as if we could be),
because it turns out that every writer who was insanely
talented was also insane, and selfish to boot. In the end,
we’d rather our kids say, “Dad played with me,” or “Mom
let me help her cook every time I asked,” than to conclude,
with slumped shoulders and an emotional backpack full
of rocks: “They were good writers, I guess, if you care
about that sort of thing.”

Once, I spoke at a university in California and hundreds
of students lined up to meet me and buy my book. One
asked, “Do you do this often?” and I laughed because,
most days, I am clearing crumbs off the table into my
bare hands, asking my toddler where it hurts, hobbling
like Quasimodo after picking up my massive baby at the
wrong angle. I am fighting insecurities I was born with,
and some that I inherited after my first marriage crumbled
like dry, salt dough. I scrawled my autograph across the
inside page of over fifty books that day, amused, because I
had never taken the time to perfect it.

I want to be read. There is no pretending that I don’t,
but I would rather be delighted like summer and eager
like spring just to live in a world where Hildegaard exists
and Richard scoots across the hardwood floor with the
pride of a thousand suns. I want to type, but I also want
to lift my chin and watch the skies for Christ, knowing
that, no matter how successful I appear, He will soon
gather us as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings
before the storm comes.

One day, Evan and I will scoop our savings into a
pile and rent a cabin on the beach for an entire
week, just to write. We will be old then, and our
children will be with their children. We will have
breakfast outside on the deck in the chill of morning,
and comment, “Isn’t it funny? Now that we have all
the time in the world to write, it doesn’t feel so urgent
anymore.” We will dip pieces of toast into fried eggs,
sip our coffee, and laugh about how beautiful
everything seems once it’s almost over.